As the latter was held at Donghua University, Charl had the chance to catch up with former postdoc Yaozu (now professor at Donghua), who also attended the conference. Charl also managed to visit a small company in Anji, a smaller city close to Hangzhou – busy time indeed!

It has been more than 10 years since Charl’s last visit to Hefei, where Shu-Hong Yu is based at the University of Science and Technology (USTC). It was great to visit his very productive laboratories, doing very impressive science, whilst also giving a talk and discussing new collaborative opportunities!

In this paper we show controlled solution self-assembly of an amphiphilic perylene diimide by a seeded-growth mechanism, to form colloidally stable, one-dimensional fibres with controllable lengths and low dispersities under kinetic control. Well done to all involved!

Luke Giles, PhD student from our collaborator Dr Rico Tabor (leading the SMaC Lab at the School of Chemistry at Monash) and co-supervised by Charl, visited our labs recently. Rico, who did his PhD at Bristol (and spent some time working in the FRG labs) is a regular visitor – it is great to now expand our interactions with Luke’s visit (as he travels around Europe).

Here Luke is with some of the FRG members before heading out back to Melbourne again! Looking forward to the next visit!

Charl was invited to visit former UoB college, Prof Huaxin Peng, now the director of the Innovative Composite Systems Institute. He had a great time talking to colleagues and students from the institute working in the areas of novel graphene-based materials, energy storage, and related applications.

It was a real pleasure to visit, with, further opportunities to catch up with colleagues from Bristol, as prof Fabrizio Scarpa (from Engineering) was also visiting at the same time!

Charl is spending some time at Tsinghua University, Beijing, hosted by collaborator Prof Xi Zhang and his group. This opportunity provides some space and time to think, write proposals and papers, chatting to the rest of the group in Bristol using wechat (or Skype), and interacting with Xi’s students!

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Faul Research Group

We are a multi-disciplinary materials chemistry research group, exploring the design principles and applications of novel functional materials.

There is a strong focus on the design, synthesis and application of a range of electroactive aniline-based oligomers and related porous conjugated materials for energy related applications. Ionic self-assembly and the production of functional hierarchical supramolecular materials are further areas of interest. An emerging activity relates to novel soft functional devices (including actuators and 3D-printed devices).